Five steps to excellence for thought leadership marketing

I am excited.

 I have just read Rob Leavitt’s article based on his impressions as a judge at the ITSMA’s Marketing Excellence Awards, for submissions in the Thought Leadership Marketing category.

 If you only read one article on thought leadership this year , this is the one to read. 

You can view his full article here http://www.reputationtorevenue.com/2010/07/strengthening-thought-leadership-marketing-five-steps-to-excellence.html  but I do cover all his points below because I believe they are worth repeating.

B2B thought leadership gains pace

Most marketers know that while thought leadership is a massive opportunity in the B2B space they also know that what constitutes thought leadership varies widely.  Rob points out that until five years ago thought leadership marketing was mainly the domain of the top consulting firms,.  Few B2B firms took it seriously.

But based on what Rob has seen judging the entries at the ITSMA awards this year, this has changed dramatically.

Not only does he say that the thought leadership submissions reflect a substantial increase in spending but more importantly that there has been a significant shift in the application of thought leadership as a discipline which is reflected in its impacts on customers and market influencers alike.

He goes on to identify five areas in which the best thought leadership campaigns stand out. 

The 5 steps to thought leadership excellence

The reason I am so excited about his analysis is because they reflect what I have been saying on this blog in various posts for over a year.  They are:

1.    Focus and depth: As Rob points out there are lots of companies out there who practice “random acts of content”, including sending out the occasional white papers, articles, videos, blog posts.  His concern is that with little focus or depth they are really providing little value.  Companies or individuals serious about joining the ranks of truly helpful thought leaders need to pick one or a few issues, stick with it, and go deep.

I would like to add to this by saying that to be truly successful, thought leadership should become part of the culture of an organisation.  If one looks at companies who are innovative or have research as their backbone – they don’t bolt these on.  Rather, they are an integral part of who they are how they think and it consumes the entire organisation every day.  Thought leadership should be no different.

2.    Do the research: As Rob points out, a lot of the so-called thought leadership we see is merely opinion based on experience. However, customers want evidence, and evidence usually requires research.

From what Rob has seen in the entries he concludes that the best thought leadership programs are built around serious research, including things like an analysis of existing literature, new customer surveys, and in-depth case studies.

3.    Engage and empower internally: Your organisation and your colleagues are one of the most important keys to your thought leadership campaign.  They are and should be its best ambassadors.

Given the pervasive nature of social media, more and more of your employees are engaging directly with customers, prospects, and other stakeholders online. By engaging and empowering these employees with your thought leadership position you give them something valuable to talk about over and above the obvious product or service specs and sales pitch.  More importantly if you have done your homework you are providing information and insights that hit the right spot with your prospects.

4.    Leverage your best content:  Market engagement today is about pervasive presence and ongoing conversations, not just traditional publishing and speaking. Rob says that customers want to chew over and debate your ideas, often without you and often in the virtual room. To help make this happen, he points out that you need to leverage your best thought leadership content by publishing compelling and appropriate formats across the networks and channels where your customers congregate.

He gives the example of a white paper and how you could leverage that into a short video, a blog post, an article, a customer briefing, etc.

5.    Invest in expertise: Great thought leadership programs are built around experts in the subjects at hand but also experts in research, analysis, publication, social media, and collaboration.

Rob believes that the most successful programs invest in their people in at least three ways:

·         Funding full time staff positions

·         Recruiting for necessary skills and helping existing staff develop the right skills

·         Investing in partnerships for complementary capabilities (including brand recognition, as with prestigious academics, universities, and/or outside media and research organizations).

Finally, and this is something I have trumpeted for a long time, building a successful thought leadership marketing program is a long-term process.

Rob uses the examples of McKinsey, Accenture, IBM, Deloitte who have spent years doing the research, building market presence, and refining what works. The common theme among them is that they pick key customer issues and stick with them.

They dive deep on these issues. And they invest in their people and programs. 

Rob, thanks for some of the best insights on thought leadership I have seen for some time.  I can’t wait to see the ITSMA results for the best thought leadership campaigns.

Tips on taking your thought leadership campaign to market – write and speak

This is a continuation of the post on 14/1/2010 on how to take your thought leadership position to market.

I spoke about six critical actions I believe need to be engaged in order to achieve this.  I have covered the first four (1. Make it a strategic business imperative; 2. Know your audience; 3. Share openly; 4. Cultivate the media).

Today I will cover the fifth:

1. Write and speak about your campaign

The last remaining will be covered in the last post in this series:

1. Pump up your content online

Action 5: Write and speak about your campaign

Your thought leadership point of view can be told through face-to-face story telling or writing. Ideally, you want to use a combination of both.

The value of having a number of compelling written stories around your thought leadership point of view is that they gives you a host of different options. With the web playing such an important role in our everyday lives, having a thought leadership campaign written up becomes critical if people are to find it online.

Writing could include one or any number of the following:

• articles written for the media
• letters
• opinion pieces
• white papers
• research summaries
• fact sheets
• background papers
• speeches
• presentations
• third party endorsements
• blogs

By using one or more of the above you are better able to share your information with your audiences. More importantly, you can make the information readily accessible to a much wider audience interested in the topic.

In their book How to position yourself as the obvious expert, Elsom Eldridge Jr and Mark Eldridge maintain that writing a book is essential in establishing your credibility in your field of expertise. They maintain that even if your book does not compete with those in the bookstores, you should write a book to use as a marketing tool to build your reputation as the obvious expert.

Tell your thought leadership story and drive word of mouth

I’m not saying you should write a book but wherever and whenever your thought leadership champion can, he or she should tell the story and get those around you enthusiastic about your point of view. Story telling is a powerful way to engage people and a great way to get people talking about what you have to say.

Word-of-mouth is the most convincing and believable form of marketing today. You should actively pursue speaking opportunities for your thought leadership champion.

These opportunities could include speaking at:

• local chambers of commerce and industry
• business organizations and associations
• academic institutions
• consumer bodies
• conferences
• seminars
• workshops
• webinars
• your own work functions

Depending on the appeal of your thought leadership point of view and your thought leader’s oratory skills, he or she could consider joining a professional speaker’s circuit. There are many organizations out there with a variety of speakers on their books. It makes it much easier to join them if you have a library of written material on your topic as well as speeches and presentations which you or your thought leader champion has already given.

Get out there and spread the word!

Tips on taking your thought leadership campaign to market - online

This is the final post of a series across how to take your thought leadership position to market.  The last one was on the 14/1/2010.

I spoke about six critical actions I believe need to be engaged in order to achieve this.  I have covered the first five (1. Make it a strategic business imperative; 2. Know your audience; 3. Share openly; 4. Cultivate the media; 5. Write and speak about your campaign) and today I will cover the sixth and last:

1. Pump up your content online

Action 6: Pump up your online content

By maximising the use of the online world for your thought leadership material, you are making your point of view easily accessible to your identified audiences and sharing it with anyone in the online world who might be interested in the topic. This could be via a blog, twitter, your website, pod cast or vlog – you name it! There are many options open to you and more are becoming mainstream every year.

The objective is to inject your brand’s/company’s personality into the debate by using social media tools to give a human face to your company’s point of view.

Importantly the web gives you the right to engage with your online audience – it is a forum where you can ask questions, your audience can ask you questions and you can have discussions with other interested parties through discussion forums, chat rooms and the ‘ask us’ facilities available on most websites.

Traditional marketing tools for campaigns have changed

The traditional levers which we have pulled as marketers, advertisers or PR practitioners to sell products and services or change behaviours, advocate causes or build brands have changed.

Word-of-mouth is by far the most powerful form of marketing a company can access, and its greatest ally is the internet.

Brands today need either to be part of or to create their own conversations online. It is becoming just as important as driving media coverage. Why? Because the internet has accelerated and amplified public opinion – rumours start and spread online.

Moreover, while newspapers, magazines, TV and radio are here today and gone tomorrow, online coverage can potentially remain filed and accessible for a long time.

Online is the domain of new, powerful content created by consumers for consumers. It is competing for our attention and trust against traditional media sources, and in some cases it is winning.

This is well illustrated in a Media Centre Global Trust Poll conducted in the US in 2006 which found that 228,000 Americans think companies do not tell the truth in advertising while 276,000 think that word-of-mouth is the best source for purchasing decisions.

Word of mouth can be powerful for your thought leadership campaign

Word-of-mouth is enshrined in social media and is now commonly recognized as the most powerful form of consumerism in the marketing mix.

If you are looking at driving a thought leadership campaign for your brand or company you need to be aware of the tools available to you online in order for you to take part in and influence this powerful medium.

Your aim should be to supercharge your thought leadership content and, in so doing, engage the company with relevant online communities and help facilitate conversations in the digital world.

A digital influence strategy should deliver four key things:

·        Knowledge about what is being said about your brand/company in the digital space and the ability to track it and take part in it.

·        Productive engagement with customers, stakeholders and influencers in the digital space.

·        Optimised content, in order to attract the search engines and increase your ranking.

·        Measurement of your digital influence campaign’s return on investment.

There are a few key things you need to consider before embarking on an online campaign:

·        Senior management buy-in is critical, as they need to understand the importance of the task. This point cannot be over emphasized

·        Engagement online is done in a collaborative community: it is about marketing with rather than marketing to an audience.

·        Commitment – there has to be a commitment to communicating on an ongoing basis.

·        Honesty and integrity are also vital. Untruths, half truths and misrepresentations are cruelly exposed online and can be damaging to your brand.

That’s the last in a series of six posts on how to take your thought leadership campaign to market, however, I know there are a lot of people out there who know an awful lot about how to do this really well.  I would love to hear from you if you have any new or fresh ideas or if you merely want to add to what I’ve said already.

Media tips on taking your thought leadership campaign to market

This is a continuation of the post on 11/1/2010 on how to take your   thought leadership position to market.

I spoke about six critical actions I believe need to be engaged in order to achieve this.  I have covered the first three (1. Make it a strategic business imperative; 2. Know your audience; 3. Share openly) and today I will cover the fourth:

1. Cultivate the media

The two remaining will be covered in subsequent posts, they are:

1. Write and speak about your campaign
2.  Pump up your content online

Action 4: Cultivate the media

While in many cases the media will be an important conduit for your thought leadership ideas, there are some campaigns that do not necessarily need media support.

For those that do, it is important you cultivate your relationships with key media players who cover the topic or sector that your thought leadership campaign addresses. By following the tracking advice in the START IP methodology you should have already done your homework, scanning the newspapers, magazines, ezines and the web for what has been written about a particular topic. In so doing, you would have identified the journalists and bloggers who are covering this or related issues.

Most in-house PR practitioners, marketing departments, PR consultancies and advertising agencies have access to online media search tools. Some of the search engines also have some useful search tools and once you have plugged in your search terms you will automatically receive any online articles mentioning those terms.

Thought leadership benefits most from exclusive rather than shotgun approach

Thought leadership requires an exclusive media approach rather than a shotgun approach. Your media campaign should take into account the audience/s you are trying to reach and which media is most appropriate for that audience. As a result of this focus and your previous searches on this issue, you may find that you need to work with only a handful of journalists.

Ideally these journalists will be looking for exclusives. If you are using research to drive your thought leadership content you may want to break it into a number of different angles and take those angles individually to the targeted media. Let them know up front they are getting the exclusive angle on this story.

Importantly, the work you do with the media, the articles they write or interviews they broadcast, the information you supply them, the backgrounders and fact sheets you draft for them should not be all that you do to reach your audiences. This same information needs to be made web friendly and placed on your website so that interested audiences using the search terms covered by your thought leadership topic can easily find the information.

The media room of a company website is often the most visited landing page.

Why?

Because the media section is where people go for the most up-to-date company information. In his great book ‘The new rules of marketing and PR’, David Meerman Scott points out that your media room should not be designed only for the media. It should be designed with each of your ‘buyers’ in mind.

Once you start achieving success with your media campaign, you can start using the coverage internally through other media, such as your intranet, notice boards and meetings. This will help champion your thought leadership campaign internally – an area often overlooked but one which can generate enormous goodwill, help drive value programs and generate a wave of pride and support from within the company.

Tips on taking your thought leadership campaign to market – share

This is a continuation of the post on the 4/1/2010 on how to take your thought leadership position to market.

I spoke about six critical actions I believe need to be engaged in order to achieve this.  I have covered the first two (1. Make it a strategic business imperative; 2. Know your audience) and today I will cover the third:

1. Share openly

The three remaining will be covered in subsequent posts, they are:

1. Cultivate the media
2. Write and speak about your campaign
3.  Pump up your content online

Action 3 – Share openly

All the true industry thought leaders I have come across have willingly and openly shared their information. The very nature of thought leadership means exactly what it says – being a leader with your thoughts. And being a leader with your thoughts means being brave and going first; saying things that no-one else has either thought of or dared to say.

It means taking the lead on an issue or topic and owning it. It is nonsense to hide behind the excuse you hear so often: ‘But this is strategic information.’

Willingly and openly sharing information may appear to be obvious but I cannot tell you how many companies I have come across who shy away from sharing their intellectual property.

Thought leaders aren’t scared

Timidity, fear and reticence are not words that sit well with true thought leadership. Being a thought leader means rising above the crowd, sticking your neck out, being prepared to take a sometimes controversial point of view and going where no-one else has ventured before.

Forget what the competition thinks or what the competition will do with the information. You are the brand/company taking the lead – they are the laggards.

It will take them a long time to get up to speed in your chosen area of thought leadership. If they want to enter your space and you have done a good job in planning and rolling out your strategy, they will look like Johnny-come-lately.

The potency of a great thought leadership campaign is that your audience will feel the genuine intent. They will view it as something fresh, something that adds value to their lives and something that no-one else is giving them.

They will respect you for it.

Thought leadership is one of the most powerful ways to create customer loyalty, which produces that most potent of market forces, word-of-mouth or customer evangelism.

It is through your thought leadership actions or the act of openly sharing valuable information that you provide the platform for creating that special brand connection with your audiences.

Tips on taking your thought leadership campaign to market - audience

This is a continuation of the post on 27/12/2009 on how to take your thought leadership position to market.

I spoke about six critical actions I believe need to be engaged in order to achieve this.

I have covered the first (1. Make it a strategic business imperative) and today I will cover the second:

1. Know your audience

 The four remaining will be covered in subsequent posts, they are:

1. Share openly
2. Cultivate the media
3. Write and speak about your campaign
4.  Pump up your content online

Action 2: Know your audiences

Knowing your audience intimately should be a prerequisite for any brand campaign, let alone a thought leadership campaign.

To know your audiences means to understand their needs and to understand how you can add value to their lives. The best thought leadership ideas mainly come from the desire to enrich the quality of the target audiences’ lives.

Once a company puts itself in the shoes of its target audiences, it is better able to identify their needs and how it can influence what that audience should think, feel and do with its services or products.

How do you get to know your audience? If your marketing department hasn’t already done so, you research them: where they live, what they consume, what micro and macro issues impact their lives, what their dreams and aspirations are, what their perceptions are of your brand and what values they associate with your brand.

Thought leadership means engaging with your audience

Where possible you also talk directly with them through focus groups or online. You could live with them or go on site visits with a community leader. Combine this with customer visits with the sales team; picking up the phone and speaking to them; hosting coffee chats or customer lunches; and using that wonderful two-way, online communications tool called a blog to facilitate dialogue.

Depending on your business and the nature of the product or service you sell, it is up to you to pick which forms of communication are best suited to your customer group.

The point is you should be listening to what they have to say in order to understand the issues important in their lives as well as the factors impacting their purchasing decisions.  This combined with a number of other factors such as your areas of specialty, pockets of intellectual property you may already have and others, should inform the direction you take with your thought leadership campaign.

The more you understand about your audience the more able you are to form a relationship based on trust and mutual understanding.

Remember their point of view is all about them not you.  You don’t have to agree with why an audience feels or acts they way they do you merely have to understand it and know how to provide information that addresses this.    

How to take your thought leadership campaign to market – strategic business imperative

I have never come across a thought leader who didn’t share his or her thoughts the two just don’t go hand in hand.

However, how you take your thought leadership position to market is critical to the success of your campaign and the degree to which you are viewed as a thought leader.

Once you have a thought leadership position worked out, there are six critical actions needed to help you or your brand achieve thought leadership status:

1. Make it a strategic business imperative
2. Know your audience
3. Share openly
4. Cultivate the media
5. Write and speak about your campaign
6.  Pump up your content online

In this post I am going to speak about the first and will cover the others in subsequent posts.

This is not a box-ticking exercise - you don’t have to complete all of these to drive your thought leadership position.  You will, however, need the first two and preferably you will need to carry out one or two of the others well to help get your point of view out there.

Action 1:  Make it a strategic business or brand imperative

By making your thought leadership campaign a strategic business imperative it will more easily slot into the short-, medium- or long-term business objectives of the company. Given this, and having identified a thought leadership champion, makes it much easier to position this as a strategic business imperative because you have already won senior management support. It is even better if the thought leadership campaign/idea is owned by the CEO or managing director.

Ownership at the top ensures commitment at a senior level, board buy-in and an easier ‘sell’ to the various departments, staff, third party endorsers and suppliers who may be involved in the campaign.

It also ensures commitment at a senior level and alignment of other business activities to the thought leadership campaign.

Thought leadership needs senior support

Without senior management commitment you run the risk of the organization’s skeptics squeezing the life out of the thought leadership effort.

At times things can go awry or the campaign is not delivering as fast or as well as it should.  At this point the avoidance or blame game begins and so starts the death spiral for the campaign…that is unless the CEO or senior management sees the thought leadership campaign as integral to the organization’s strategy and is still prepared to back it as a result.   

If a leader makes success non-negotiable it is amazing how much impetus it can give the campaign.

Make no mistake, you will still need to make sure that you have a well thought out and presented plan.  This should cover the thought leadership idea in detail but also, importantly, how you intend to roll it out.

As part of this you should identify clear objectives, your rationale for doing this and measurable outcomes.  The more measurable your outcomes the more likely you are to gain credibility for the campaign across the senior management ranks and for future funding.